Simone Schröder has completed an M.A. in comparative literature at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Since 2014 she is a PhD candidate at the University of Bath, UK. She writes an ecocritical thesis about the poetic and epistemological function of the nature essay. Her project features textual analyses of a broad range of essayists including, but not limited to, nineteenth century holist scientists like Alexander von Humboldt, Modernists such as Virginia Woolf and Robert Musil, and contemporary writers like Eliot Weinberger, David Foster Wallace and Andreas Maier.

Abstract

Identity, place, and a sense of belonging to a specific region are factors which have shaped most twentieth and twenty-first century nature writing throughout Europe. This article argues that German-language nature writing is, however, a special case. Due to the appropriation of the aforementioned concepts in the Nazis’ Blood and Soil doctrine, relations to a national landscape have become problematic for most post-Shoah generation writers. Born into a nation for which belonging and Heimat once were used as a means to justify the genocide of non-Aryan groups, access to an innocent, identificatory approach to nature is cut off. It is therefore no coincidence that both W.G. Sebald in The Alps in the Sea and Peter Handke in Lesson of Montagne Sainte-Victoire turn towards foreign landscape. Instead of pondering upon a specific German or Austrian region they belong to, they describe walks through Corsica and France. By linking their experience of these surroundings to other regions, to history and art, they create a truly European panorama and establish an aesthetics of transient dwelling. The form of the literary essay for which digressions, lengthy contemplations and sudden changes of discourse are typical enables them to combine a set of different perspectives on nature. Besides, the essay’s meandering form matches their struggle with an identity rooted in a specific soil. And still, a sense of loss, represented in the guise of an expulsion metanarrative, pervades.